I never paid much attention to the growing BDS movement because I’m not into bondage, domination, and submission. But it turns out that BDS is actually a decade-old Palestinian rights movement that targets Israel for boycott, divestment, and sanctions. These are the same tools that student protestors, such as Barack Obama, demanded be implemented against white rule in South Africa in the 1980s.

While fairly mainstream in other parts of the world (for example, physicist Stephen Hawking boycotted a conference in Israel to protest occupation of the West Bank), BDS hasn’t yet become respectable in the United States. The main exception has been in the playpen of student government on California college campuses, where the much-celebrated diversity has furnished fertile ground for undergraduate demagogues.

So far, BDS resolutions have been passed by eight student governments, Loyola of Chicago and seven California schools: private Stanford and a half dozen public University of California campuses, including Berkeley and UCLA, both of which are of symbolic importance. (Tellingly, a BDS resolution was defeated at UC Santa Barbara, which has the whitest UC student body at 36 percent.)

In California, the state with the largest number and greatest diversity of newcomers, immigration is destabilizing the American order in which Jews have thrived.